Beliefs serve decision-making under conditions of uncertainty. Without uncertainty, we just act. I don't "believe" the ground will stop my foot when I walk....That's just the neural prediction and reward-seeking machinery running smoothly. It's when the machinery gets stuck that the brain shifts into belief mode to help break the logjam.
Jumping the groove from dopamine to self-efficacy: here we go!
What stands out in this map is that Red States are less densely populated than Blue States. They're more rural with plenty of room for people to spread out. Since rural homes are bigger and traveling distances farther, it should come as no surprise that Red States consume more energy per capita than Blue States. This is a function of landscape and livelihood, not politics. If you're a farmer, you don't tootle around in a Prius - you've got a pick-up.
According to the Conference of State Legislatures, net metering policies "have facilitated the expansion of renewable energy through on-site, also known as distributed, generation." Common distributed generation sources include solar panels, natural gas, micro-turbines, methane digesters, and small wind power generators.
The hypothesis: many Republicans would like to see a reduction in Green House Gas (GHG) emissions, whether or not they believe in anthropogenic climate change. Please see Part I of this series for how I arrived at this hypothesis. ... Now, let's test the hypothesis.
According to a recent Pew Research Center report, most Republicans and Republican-leaning Americans (heretofore "Republicans") do not believe in anthropogenic climate change. Does that mean they won't support policies or regulations that reduce green house gas (GHG) emissions?
Here in a glance are the politics of each state, the most popular governors and the best performing states in terms of fiscal health, level of inequality, affordability, poverty rate, and labor market participation.
...in 1901 the average US family’s income was $750 - worth about $2300 a century later. Before 1940, households spent more than a third of their income on food alone.
Meanwhile, the National Conference of State Legislatures released a report on the partisan composition of state legislatures as of November 8, 2017. I figured that state legislatures are largely responsible for the fiscal health of their states and was curious how the state fiscal rankings matched up with the political composition of their legislatures. This is what I found...
If these additional heuristics were put into words, they may sound like "when in doubt, go with tough love" or "when in doubt, provide relief". Note how uncertainty ("when in doubt") calls for heuristic assistance. Help! I need a heuristic! Thinking hard is aversive!
Unfortunately, the AWS authors mix well-documented facts (say, the spreading of ocean dead zones) with less widely supported claims (say, the unmitigated threat of "alien species"), blurring the line between the known and the hypothetical.
"Since the payoffs of free riders depend on the total contribution to the public good, the only way to punish free riders in this experiment was to stop contributing. This is the tragedy of the commons.” - Section 4.7 Public good contributions and peer punishment - The Economy
Ask a climate change skeptic why they don't trust climate change claims and you may get a history of false alarms in the environmental movement - false alarms endorsed by prominent scientists. Remember the population explosion, peak oil? So when scientists confidently predict global disaster in the very near future, a skeptic would likely file that one away as another case of alarmist rhetoric coming from the usual suspects.
These "Concerned Scientists" posts address a recent viewpoint article in the journal BioScience, World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice (2017), in terms of how effectively it conveys its message to climate change skeptics. No, that’s not me. It’s those members of the public the authors are trying to reach. They’re trying to change minds, convince people that climate change is not only real but that it's potentially catastrophic and serious action is urgent.
That adds up to 75% of households within the lowest income quintile that are either families headed by women or individuals living alone. In other words, fathers living with their families are mostly missing from the poorest households in this country.
Previous posts addressed household income in relation to age of householders, number of earners per household, and type of housing. This time we'll look at the recent work experience of householders (what used to be called the "head of household).
One surprise is that so many of the low-income households are owner-occupied. But remember, per our previous posts, that 57% of the lowest income category are headed by individuals who are 55 or older. A
My purpose here ... is to understand why some people get stuck in poverty, because you can't hope to fix a problem you don't understand. And part of that is figuring out who needs help and what kind of help. Sometimes we're talking about old or disabled people, who don't need a job - they just need to help in paying their bills. Sometimes we're talking about young people whose poverty is transient (see that 14% in the lowest income group with a Bachelor's Degree or more?), who don't really need special assistance from the government. And then there are the poorly educated and single parent families.
A few observations. Lower income households skew old: 57% are 55 or older, an age group likely to be dominated by retirees and disabled folk. Affluent households skew middle aged, but once they hit the golden years, their numbers dwindle...
But science is a way of thinking, not a body of knowledge. Science is a way to acquire knowledge. Science is about being ruthless with oneself and the evidence; proposing and testing hypotheses, over and over; being careful, tentative, incremental and alert to alternative explanations.